Animal Enhancement, Uplift or Augmentation? Clarifying concepts

Abstract

The ethical debate on human enhancement has motivated to discuss about animal enhancement. In this nascent discussion, various concepts that refer to the technological modification of animals are sometimes used indistinctly, including animal enhancement, animal uplift, animal augmentation and animal disenhancement. The purpose of this article is to provide a more precise definition of the above concepts. For this, the available literature on the debate was reviewed and it was concluded that these terms, although similar, refer to different types of technological modifications.